Reminds me of how the Learned Experts used to say that Assyria didn't really exist and it was only a Biblical fable. Then, they unearthed some bits of junk and suddenly, "looky there Marge, there really was an Assyria!"
It is interesting what you find when you look.
There were never any Learned Experts who denied that Assyria existed; the locations of the major Assyrian sites were unknown, and became known because people looked for them. The site of Akkad/Agade, Sargon the Great’s capital of Assyria during the eponymous Akkadian period, remains unknown, although in surviving texts it was new-built somewhere near Kish, where Sargon spent his early years.
The Assyrian Empire was destroyed late in the 7th c BC by an alliance of Medes, Scythians, and Babylonians. Herodotus (for example) discusses the Assyrians as if they were still a going concern, perhaps confusing the Assyrians with the Babylonians. By his time, neither one was a going concern, but both are Semitic peoples, and they hadn’t ceased to exist as ethnic groups. The ancient Greeks sometimes referred to the Persians as Medes, but that’s not accurate; the Greeks called one or more of the New Kingdom pharaohs Sesostris, but Sesostris was actually the name of some pharaohs during the Old Kingdom. Ramses II “the Great”, interestingly enough, had a monumental statue of one of those Old Kingdom Sesostrises recarved a bit into his own image.
The name “Hittites” was only known in the Bible, and when the site of Hattusas was found, the name was lifted from the Bible, regardless of the facts that 1) it isn’t accurate and 2) the invention of the so-called “Forgotten Empire” actually props up the conventional pseudochronology of the Middle East, which itself is hung on the Egyptian chronology, itself an invention with only a trivial connection to the various fragmentary lists of pharaohs.
Neither do Troy nor Atlantis...